When comparing Monkey X vs Clickteam Fusion 2.5, the Slant community recommends Monkey X for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”Monkey X is ranked 18th while Clickteam Fusion 2.5 is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Monkey X is:

Developers can make native calls directly from Monkey code. This allows access to any native functionality and platform-specific features.

You can create custom targets

Pro

Low cost license fee

Pro

Native module support

You are not restricted only to the modules you get from the official release. You can build your own stuff. Even build your own "app" module. It feels limitless. In comparison with other cross platform solutions, you actually get the translated source code and you can play with it if you want.

Pro

Easy to learn

With it's Object orientation and clean syntax its a brilliant language to learn if you have never done any programming before and yet still has all the power it needs to make full games and apps.

Pro

Uses a great, easy to learn language

Monkey X uses a custom programming language (called Monkey) for all its scripting needs. Monkey is rather easy to learn, it's object-oriented which will help most programmers with understanding it. It's also statically typed and uses a garbage collector, helping to avoid manual memory management.

Pro

Partly open-source

The entirety of the base-language itself is open source. Commercial modules such as Mojo for non-free platforms cost a one-time fee. Though Mojo is not free for all targets, the targets for these platforms are, meaning it is possible to implement other frameworks for these targets.

The Desktop (GLFW and C++ based) and HTML5 implementations of Mojo are currently free and open source.

The language's development is completely public, and is managed via GitHub.

Pro

Free HTML5 and Desktop (GLFW) target platform

The free version of Monkey X lets you compile to HTML5 or Desktop (GLFW). Other platforms such as iOS, Android (and OUYA), XNA, Flash and Windows 8 (Phone) require the paid version of Monkey X Pro.

Pro

Cross-platform

Monkey X is a cross-platform game engine. It allows developers to run the same code on multiple platforms, including iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Flash, Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

The development environment supports Windows, OS X, and Linux.

Pro

Not running in its own VM

Unlike other multi-platform engines (Unity3D, Corona, etc), Monkey-X games do not run explicitly in their own virtual machines. Your code is translated into the native languages of each target platform, and then compiled as a native executable. However, just as native games, on platforms such as Android (Currently), and HTML5, games will be ran through the targeted platform's usual VM(s). That being said, you won't be dealing with a proprietary virtual machine, so you won't experience any real overhead when compared to a native game.

Pro

Made by the Mark Sibly Factor

The Mark Sibly Factor denotes that a programming language will be easy to learn, fun to learn and allow any age group ( within Cognitive Reason ) to program games and great games. The Mark Sibly Factor denotes also that the games programming language you purchase will be backed by decades of compiler programming experience, game making tool programming and finally a Game Programming Language that kicks Ass.

Pro

Free for commercial releases

With the free version of Monkey you are still able to create commercial HTML5 and Desktop games.

Built-in modules for quickly building games

Pro

Lots of great examples

Monkey X includes over 50 examples ranging from complete sample games to demos of single features.

Pro

Object oriented programming

MonkeyX is an object-oriented dialect of BASIC that's easy, clean and powerful.

Pro

Export native runtime for all platforms

Be it Windows EXE, Android APK, iOS, HTML5 and Flash SWF, Fusion 2.5 is able to export your game to fast, truly native runtime for specified platform with a click.

Pro

Intuitive drag & drop interface & visual event editor

CF2.5 uses a straightforward drag & drop editor that allows for easy level, animation and event creation without having to write a single line of code.

Pro

Not only is it the best, it is the original

This software has been around since 1994 (then called Klik & Play) and is still going very strong. Also, one of the founders of Clickteam was the developer of STOS BASIC and AMOS BASIC for the Atari ST and Amiga computers.

Pro

Community-driven extensive object repository

Click Fusion has a great selection of extensions submitted by the community.

The extensions cover a variety of game-building tasks including parsing of strings using up to two alternating delimiters using the "Tokenizer Object", generating random numbers without reusing them from multiple lists which can be refilled and distinctively replenished with the "Random Multipool Object" among others.

Pro

Developers work so closely with the user base

Dedicated Bug tracking system linked to user forum for ease of access.

Pro

Box2D physics engine included on all platforms

Clickteam Fusion 2.5 brings to you the box2D physics engine.

Pro

Can also create Windows applications

CF allows creating Windows applications. Additionally, due to hundreds of available extensions, the process is quick.

Pro

Well-optimized

Runs well under high object numbers, particularly on PC and iOS thanks to hardware acceleration.

Pro

Upgrade discounts

If you buy Fusion 2.5, and later decide you want to upgrade to the Developer version, or in the case of moving from MMF2 to F2.5, the company offers upgrade discounts.

Pro

Free version

Pro

Supportive, passionate community

Any time you have a question or a problem, the community and the software developers are there to help you out either on forums or steam. The devs repond quickly to private messages or instantly on ClickConverse (chat). Additionally, many users have support sites with open source examples and tutorials.

Pro

Permissive runtime license agreement

With the Developer edition of the product, there are absolutely no limits or requirements when selling your creations. You are free to make as much money as you want (this applies to the Standard edition too), and you don't have to include any logos or credits in your creations.

Pro

Balanced feature set

An excellent compromise between ease of use, power, flexibility and ability to export to different platforms. Easy to learn for beginners with the ability to make complex things, of course, at the expense of a larger effort. Good rapid application development tool for making 2D games.

Pro

Great IRL user events

Clickteam holds user conventions for customers to come along, meet the staff and hang out with people who they've met online. This furthers the community spirit which is so prevalent around Clickteam's products and it's a fantastic weekend.

Pro

Exports native mobile code, making great performance games

Pro

A great unofficial community for Spanish-speaking users

A great community in Spanish where you will receive all the help you need to solve your doubts and problems. You'll also find all kinds of resources and materials in Spanish.

Pro

Stable

Have used fusion 2.5 through all of its iterations, even when it was owned by imsi as CNC ( click n create ) it has been very stable and projects have been known to run on almost any Windows based computer. The projects you create even run on future versions of Windows with never many issues.

Pro

Great online store to get free and paid assets

Pro

Great for non-game apps, such as tools, utilities, multimedia projects, etc.

Pro

Great formula editor, which allows you to create complex maths and events with ease

Pro

Box2D physics engine

Pro

Can create custom extensions

Pro

Visual (HLSL) effects

Cons

Con

The documentation is not very thorough

The documentation contains a reasonably detailed language overview, and a somewhat-generated list of the included modules, classes, and methods. Module descriptions are rather lax, but usually present. Method descriptions tend to be short, and a majority of them contain no usage snippets; most parameters have very minimal descriptions. And there are no community collaboration features to help improve it, besides GitHub.

Con

The included IDE is poor

Although better IDE'S are availabe for a price, the default one is bare bones and lacks functionality

Con

No real asset store

Untangling how to keep assets in the ".data" requires attention and a filenaming convention.

Con

You'll have to learn a new programming language

Even though Monkey is rather easy to learn and borrows a lot of concepts from more popular languages, having to learn a new language develop games is a lot of friction for people that already know how to program in other languages..

Con

limited OS export targets with free version

Free version only targets Desktop (macOS, Windows, Linux) and HTML5, not mobile.

Con

Some features are really outdated and major updates are few and rare

There are some features that could make the software a lot more powerful but Clickteam does not have the staff resources to handle updating the software to be competitive with similar software.

Con

Its Event Editor can be cumbersome if you are working on complex projects

While Fusion's visual programming event system is great to simplify things, it can be much more cumbersome to work with it than reading lines of code when you are working on a complex project. Especially if your events involve many nested conditions and lots of objects on the frame.

You are able to group events and objects, but it doesn't help at all if there's lots of conditions on an event and it becomes pretty hard to read.

Con

Many extensions not available on non-Windows platforms

A lot of community-made extensions are only written for Windows, making it hard to port your game to other platforms.

Con

Need to copy & paste events into every frame

Events are not shared globally across multiple frames. In order to have the player going from one frame to the other, you need to copy and paste all the code from one frame to the other.

This is obviously very tedious and time consuming.

Con

No animation/object hierarchy

You need to position/rotate objects manually.

Con

Many event 'gotchas', especially with object selection

Many events have very unpredictable selection behavior, e.g. the 'Create' action (where the selection depends on whether a selection list already exists).

There is also a lot of subtle selection behavior, e.g. implicit object pairs for actions when an object is used in an expression.

Con

Need to write C++ extensions when existing extensions don't cut it

If you need e.g. a Steamworks extension or 3D display extension, you need to move out from the event system and create extensions in C++ with a cumbersome API. Fusion does not have FFI calls like other programming languages

Con

No native animator with curves, etc

Con

Slow event system

Since the event system is interpreted, complex frames will start to slow down. This is also caused by poor code reuse, as usually, you need to copy+paste events with new conditions, making it impossible to cache intermediate results.

Con

Poor native movements

The native non-physical movements are practically unusable if you don't want to use Box2D physics in your game.

Con

Cannot script editor

You cannot script the IDE or editor with e.g. macros or custom functionality, like you can in other popular game engines.